A modest proposal

[andrewducker]

The Conservatives believe that a hung parliament would be bad for Britain.

There's a simple solution to that.

If they removed themselves from the race then the chances of the result not being clear-cut would drop to near-zero.

Comments

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

It's just an electoral tactic to try and scare people away from voting Lib-Dem. It would require a surprisingly small percentage of voters who are considering voting Lib-Dem to not do so to have a big effect on the outcome of the election.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

By the same logic it would only take a small percentage of voters who are considering not voting Lib-Dem to vote Lib-Dem to have a big effect?

Oh wait, it won't. That's the whole reason why the Lib Dems want proportional representation.

See also

http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2026125.html

for an explanation of why this comment is wrong in almost every possible way about the significance of an individual Lib-Dem vote.

[matgb]

No, not really. Once the LDs break past 36% of the vote, they start gaining seats rapidly, at 38% they're probably at a majority.

Depending on where the breaks lies, best analysis I can do shows they need less votes than the Tories to get an overall majority; but it does depend far too much on individual constituencies.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

Ignoring Mori who have the lib dems at ~ 24%, the other polls have them between 29% and 33%. Taking an average of 31% we discover that we're after 5% of the voters to change to lib dem to make a substantial change to the number of seats.

27 million votes were cast at the last election, so that's approximately 1.4million more voters than we're expecting based on the present poll.

1.4million is a new and interesting definition of 'surprisingly small'.

[matgb]

Firstly, turnout's likely to be up, from what I've seen, registration is certainly way up. So it's more than 1.4 million.

However; the polls seem to indicate that a lot of those new registrants, and a lot of those that formerly haven't been voting. There's evidence from Canada that the biggest swings aren't normally from one party to another, but from voting to non-voting and vice versa.

So, while you're right to say 1.4+million is a large total number, it is actually a small proportion of those that didn't vote last time and are indicating they plan to vote this time.

Plus, the LDs normally get a poll bounce in the campaign in the last ten days of it. It's uncertain right now as to whether that bounce has happened early this year, or is still to happen.

There's also a chance that this "hung parliament party" nonsense will play into their hands, voters might decide that if a hung Parliament is bad, then it's best to vote LD in even bigger numbers, etc etc.

However, Aaron's point was that of those currently planning to vote LD, it doesn't take many of them to be scared away for the LD # of seats to collapse; that's very true. If htey lose 4 points in the opinion polls, they're in definite 3rd party status territory.

If they gain 4%, they're in distinct first party status territory. At 32%, they're already 13-15% up on the start of the campaign, with polls this volatile, further increases are just as possible as further decreases.

Interesting times, regardless.

[matgb]

And having now followed that link in your name, I remember why I knew the domain; I really miss having Chris's analysis of this sort of thing, didn't always agree with him, but he really could crunch those numbers.